by John Ringo
I do not like this terrain, with its limited visibility and plenty of cover and concealment for enemy gun emplacements. The rebels could hide an entire division in the forested fringe that lies several hundred meters above me and I would not detect their presence until they opened fire. I therefore move ahead with all available sensors sharply tuned. I would be happier if all my sensors were available, but I suffer port-side blind spots, thanks to cumulative sniper-fire damage.
I would be much happier still, if I could conduct aerial reconnaissance, but I have no drones. Although Phil has been able to produce satisfactory aerial surveillance equipment by piggybacking cameras onto children’s toys, I am out of them again. The rebel marksmen’s skill at shooting them down surpasses Phil’s speed at manufacturing new ones. Toy airplanes, like everything else on Jefferson, are in short supply and the cameras are even harder to locate and steal. Using other sensor arrays, I scan across a wide band of visual, audio, and electromagnetic spectra, looking for anything out of the ordinary. I detect no heavy-weapons emissions, only the background power bleed from ordinary household current.
I am approximately one point five kilometers from the coordinates supplied by Sar Gremian when police transmissions from the patrol take on a frantic urgency.
“They’re comin’ at us again! I’m hit — Jeezus, I’m hit—”
I detect gunfire, not only through the radio link, but dead ahead, with my own sensors. I can hear screams, as well, men in pain. I rush forward through the narrowest part of the canyon, gaining speed rapidly in an emergency sprint that sends me barreling across the intervening distance—
—minefield!
I detect it too late to stop. I kill forward thrust and lock starboard drive wheels. I skid sideways, further slowing my forward motion. My port-side treads slew around, spinning my stern in a dizzy whirl—
SECOND MINEFIELD TO PORT!
Massive explosions rip my port-side treads to confetti. My entire port side rocks upward, off the ground. I am stunned by the concussion. Sensors scream pain warnings all the way down my port-side hull. I have lost seventeen external sensor arrays and four banks of antipersonnel guns. The second minefield was fiendishly placed: precisely where missing port-side sensors had left me blind in several critical spots. I am still assessing battle damage when I catch the unmistakable emissions of a Hellbore coming on-line.
Battle Reflex Alert!
It fires from a point high on the cliff that rises to my right, above my prow. I throw my shields on-line and brace for impact. The Hellbore blast does not strike me, however. It rips through the opposite cliff, directly above my skewed-around, scorched stern. Solid rock blows out nearly a hundred meters overhead. An avalanche smashes down into the narrow passage. I am directly under it. Half the cliff comes down. Damage-assessment sensors scream red-line warnings. Hull-ringing boulders destroy my upper-most sensor arrays. Antipersonnel guns shear off. Impact sensors register several tons of rock crashing into my warhull. My stern-mounted Hellbore’s rotation collar cracks catastrophically.
Even as the landslide buries my entire stern, I fire bombardment rockets at the Hellbore that took out the cliff. I score a hit — but others pop online. Two, three, five of them. They fire from defiladed positions, raking my entire port flank along a deadly diagonal line. They fire in unison and concentrate their combined fire on the same, one square meter target. They punch through my defensive screens and melt an entire cluster of infinite repeaters and two square meters of ablative armor. The combined fire scores the flintsteel hull beneath armor plates in a long, molten gouge. If they fire another combined hit on that spot, they will breach my hull.
These bastards have studied Etaine!
I roar into Battle Reflex Mode. I fire bombardment rockets in a massive barrage. Rebel-launched hyper-v missiles scream skyward, knocking down ninety-nine point three percent of my rockets mid-flight. Two get through and score direct hits. Both blasts destroy the mobile platforms to which the Hellbores were mounted. The guns leap off the ground under the impact. Mobile truck-beds flip over midair and plunge down the cliff face to smash into the canyon floor just beyond my prow. They land in the minefield and vanish in a secondary explosion. The mines detonate with sufficient force to scorch my nearest radar arrays. The other Hellbores drop off-line and vanish behind the clifftops.
The attack is over as swiftly and brutally as it began.
I am stunned. Not only by the level of skill and knowledge evinced in this attack, but by the fact that I detected six mobile Hellbore field guns, when the rebels should have been able to field only three. No other thefts of heavy weaponry have been reported from Jefferson’s remaining military arsenals. A lack of on-world robberies translates directly into an inescapable conclusion: the rebels have obtained off-world weapons. This means off-world financing, on what has to be an immense scale. And procurement agents who are able to smuggle in large shipments, probably dropped in remote regions via shuttles from an orbital freighter, since not even P-Squad officers on the take would allow mobile Hellbores to pass through their customs check-points.
This is ghastly news.
So is the pin-point accuracy of rebel fire at my major vulnerable points. That second minefield was deliberately placed by someone fully aware of the preexisting damage to my port-side sensors. Indeed, I speculate that these sensors were deliberately targeted in a series of advance raids, specifically to engineer this ambush. The subsequent combined salvos, striking precisely where they did, were neither accident nor unhappy chance. The rebel commander was not trying to cripple me. He was going for a kill.
The fact, taken alone, is hardly surprising, since any sane rebel commander would try to destroy me. What sends shockwaves through my personality gestalt circuitry, however, is the chilling fact that he has acquired the means to do it. Those shockwaves send conflicting reactions jittering through my personality gestalt center. Outrage, dismay, anger, even a welcome relief that at last, I again have an enemy worthy of the name. There is little honor in shooting a sniper with a rifle or a suicide bomber trying to run after throwing an octocellulose grenade into my nearest video sensors. But a commander devious and intelligent and knowledgeable enough to pull off this ambush is a worthy opponent. I begin to relish the thought of destroying him.
When I pull myself free of the rubble, my lacerated left tread simply falls off. For the first time, I have not won an encounter with the rebels. The damage is serious and semicrippling. It will tax Phil to the utmost, trying to repair it. I turn cautiously, using ground-penetrating radar to locate buried mines, which I target and destroy with my forward infinite repeaters. This clears a space through which I can safely limp forward. I proceed with extreme caution, moving at a pitiful crawl on two treads and a rank of bare drive wheels.
When I reach the ranch on which the police squad was pinned down, I do a swift reconnaissance from two hundred meters out. I am wary of further ambushes. A two-story ranch house to my left appears to be deserted. I detect no heat signatures through the windows, none that would correspond to a human-sized target, at any rate. A number of barns and out-buildings suggest hiding places for artillery, but I can see nothing like tire tracks that would indicate the passage of a field-artillery gun through the farmyard. A police vehicle is parked next to a hog-lot. Markings on the doors identify the car as a Madison municipal police cruiser assigned to traffic duty. It is out of its jurisdiction. By a considerable margin. The cruiser has been abandoned with its trunk open. The hog-lot gate is also open. A substantial herd of genetically adapted swine has escaped through this gate, spilling out across the entire barnyard.
I move forward cautiously, broadcasting a query to the pinned-down officers. I receive no response, only static. At a distance of one hundred meters, closing slowly on the apparently deserted farmyard, I spot an open poultry house twelve meters from the abandoned police cruiser. Through the movement and sound spilling through the open doors, I identify several thousand chickens, neatly caged for effi
cient egg production. A few of the cages have been pulled down and opened, freeing some thirty or forty birds, which mill around the barn floor, looking for food.
The poultry house has been hit by a heavy barrage of small-arms fire. Bullet holes riddle the walls. I halt fifty meters out, scanning with all available sensors and find the missing police officers. All five of them are down. They are all assuming ambient air temperature. Based on heat signatures, I estimate they were overrun and killed at approximately the same instant the rebel Hellbores opened fire on me. The timing suggests all sorts of interesting capabilities in the rebel command structure.
At a distance of twenty-three meters from the farmyard, I am close enough that my forward turret sensors can see inside the police cruiser’s open trunk. It contains three freshly killed geno-pigs and the carcasses of at least a dozen chickens. The dead officers were assigned to a Madison traffic-control squadron, not a P-Squad foraging team. Traffic police are not authorized to collect in-kind taxes from livestock producers.
These men are thieves!
I sit motionless for a full seventeen point three seconds, psychotronic synapses crackling, as I attempt to come to grips with what has transpired and why. I have sustained massive damage trying to rescue a pack of illiterate, power-abusing livestock rustlers. Does one rustle hogs? Or merely steal them? I am sufficiently proficient in twenty-seven Terran languages to curse — fluently — if the situation seems appropriate, but I cannot even find words to express my full and penetrating disgust.
The fact that I was lured into an ambush, using them as bait, suggests frequent raids on the region’s farmyards conducted by Madison’s municipal police force. An isolated incident or two would be insufficient to set up an ambush this elaborate. This kind of operation must, of necessity, rely on a pattern predictable enough to have soldiers, munitions, and artillery in position and ready to deploy rapidly to a target close by. I surmise, therefore, that these officers have been stealing for quite a while, in a pattern predictable enough for Commodore Oroton to take advantage of it.
Disgust deepens. I call a forensics team and send them the map coordinates of the perforated poultry house, then turn around and rattle my way out of the barnyard. I do not even bother to file a VSR to Sar Gremian and the president. Anything I might say at this juncture would only worsen the friction between myself and the two most powerful officials on Jefferson.
Basic military doctrine dictates the need to leave a combat zone by a different route than the one used to approach. I therefore select the nearer of the two remaining routes that will take me back out to the Adero floodplain. I drop out of Battle Reflex Mode, although I maintain the heightened vigilance of Battle Reflex Alert. I navigate the narrow canyon at a snail’s pace, grinding along slowly on the drive wheels which automatically dropped down to road-level height to compensate for the missing track. I leave a deep furrow behind where bare wheels cut into the soil. The partially melted wheel drags in its locked position, heating up and warping even further before enough of the surface is ground down by friction that it no longer touches the ground at all.
The route I have chosen takes me past the main generating plant that supplies electricity to the ranches in Cimmero Canyon and to Menassa. The canyon floor has opened out into a broad space that nearly qualifies as a valley, rather than a canyon, with the open Adero floodplain nearly ten kilometers beyond. From the standpoint of human aesthetics, this is pretty country. I find it attractive for reasons of my own. The open terrain makes it more difficult for the Enemy to lay an ambush. There is plenty of forest cover on both slopes, which rise gently toward the heavier timber at the higher elevations, but the Enemy cannot establish firing points directly overhead, concealed from my vantage point.
This is cause for celebration, given my current pitiful state.
I parallel the main road, trying not to crush it under my remaining treads or dig massive furrows into it with naked drive wheels. Beyond the power plant lies a small cluster of single-family dwellings that house utility crews and foremen working at the Cimmero Canyon electrical generating plant. Like the massive Klameth Canyon hydroelectric dam, farther south, this plant produces power from turbines built to harness the outflow of the Bimini Reservoir, created by damming a small river that flows down through a deep, weathered gorge. The reservoir is small, compared with Klameth’s, and so is the total wattage produced by the station, but it needs to supply only the ranches in Cimmero Canyon, Manassa, and the small town of Gissa.
Even so, its generating capacity is sufficient to create a haze of background power emissions that crackle through my sensors. The plant was built sufficiently close to the road that I maneuver across a short section of pavement to reach open ground on the other side. I do not wish to knock down, even accidentally, a tower carrying high-tension wires that carry several gigawatts of electrical power. A sprawl of buildings shoulder their way past my port-side drive wheels as I grind my way toward the still-distant mouth of the canyon—
AMBUSH!
The Hellbore blast catches me flat-footed. Raw destruction slashes across my forward turret, targeting the base of my forward Hellbore. I reel. I stagger drunkenly in an attempt to swing my own Hellbores into action. I snap my defensive screen into place just as a second mobile Hellbore flashes on-line. It pours energy into my screen, which strains to contain the damage. Then both enemy Hellbores fire simultaneously, delivering a second one-two punch. It slices perilously close to the previous gouge, trying to punch through my damaged hull.
Fury sweeps through my personality gestalt center. I roar into Battle Reflex Mode, enraged. I dig my bare drive wheels into the ground and execute a spinning pivot-turn to port. I cannot reach either enemy Hellbore with direct fire, not without risking critical power-plant infrastructure. They have, naturally, hidden behind that infrastructure, hoping it will constitute an inviolate shield.
I engage with high-angle mortars. Warheads drop like blazing rain around both enemy guns. Their crews, however, have already taken evasive maneuvers. They manage to avoid the mortar rounds with minimal scorching. They shoot at me on the run, dodging and ducking behind other buildings. Several bolts strike my screens on the oblique, recharging my energy screen rather than punching through. Missed shots whip past my warhull and slam into the valley’s far slope, igniting a forest fire. I rush forward, trying to gain a vantage point from which I can shoot without taking out half the generating plant in the process. Minefield warnings sparkle on my threat-assessment processors. I disdain them, smashing my way through to reach an optimal firing position. I sustain damage to my central track, but reach my objective.
I fire on the nearest mobile Hellbore. It vanishes in a violent expansion of flame and debris. The second Hellbore rushes for cover, vanishing from visual contact behind a massive concrete building. I no longer care about collateral damage. I open fire with my forward Hellbore, punching through the concrete structure in an effort to pinhole the fleeing gun crew behind it. One, two, three blasts rip through the building, reducing it to smoking rubble and flying debris. The mobile Hellbore rushes into the open for zero point nine-two seconds, then lurches out of sight, again, behind another structure.
I give chase. I cannot move as fast as the renegade crew trying to escape my wrath. I therefore plow forward on the diagonal, crushing the corners of two houses belonging to the power plant’s utility crew. I must destroy the enemy’s heavy armaments at all cost, before the rebels deal my own death blow.
I catch a snippet of communications from somewhere nearby, probably not from the running gun crew. It is in code that I cannot break. I cannot even accurately pinpoint its origin, which prevents me from opening fire on the transmitter. The fleeing Hellbore has rushed far ahead of me, having skipped and dodged its way around sufficient bends in the valley that I cannot see it. I am able to track power emissions from its mobile platform and fire more high-angle mortars, trying to blanket the valley ahead with a shotgun peppering of rounds.
I he
ar detonations, but these are low-tech mortar shells, not smart-rounds that can transmit pictures back to me or allow me to fly the weapon into the target from a remote position. I have long since used up those munitions and POPPA has not seen fit to replace them. I am therefore left with a hit-or-miss proposition known as “carpet bombing” in an effort to strike a small, moving target.
I need intel. My on-board maps show several small feeder gorges into which the crew could duck and shut down, hiding successfully for hours in spaces too narrow for me to pursue. They could also continue their rushing flight through the town of Menassa, relying on the buildings and the civilians in them to deter my pursuit and attack. Or they can run for the nearest maze of major canyons, twenty kilometers south of Menassa. I do not have enough information to determine the crew’s intention. Striking out across country would be its greatest risk, but would give it a greater chance of ultimate escape, rather than temporary concealment nearby.
I target the feeder gorges with a steady barrage of mortars, hoping to create a blockade of raining munitions that will prevent the crew from taking advantage of those smaller, closer gorges as a hiding place. My inability to see what I am shooting at is infuriating. I decide the most logical move the crew could make would be to head for Menassa, which will keep it shielded for at least half of its twenty-kilometer dash toward the canyons farther south.
I therefore anticipate loss of visual contact as I reach the valley’s mouth and Menassa spreads out in its long, ropy line along Route 103. I am therefore stunned to see the Hellbore’s mobile platform rushing straight down the highway, nearly at the horizon line, within smelling distance of safety. The crew has opted for the riskier high-speed dash for safety, thinking my own progress slow enough to prevent me from overtaking them. I do not need to catch them in a road race to destroy them. I exult. I target. I acquire weapons lock. I fire. Hyper-v missiles streak down the long, beautifully straight road, locked onto the vanishing tail-lights of the racing truck.